Single Lives

KATHERINE FAMA is an assistant professor of American literature in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin in Ireland.JORIE LAGERWEY is an associate professor in television studies at University College Dublin in Ireland. She is the author, with Taylor Nygaard, of Horrible White People: Gender, Genre, and Television’s Precarious Whiteness and Postfeminist Celebrity and Motherhood: Brand Mom.

• Introduction: Situating Single Lives by Katherine Fama and Jorie LagerweyPart I: Singles Studies: Archives and MethodsChapter 1: Searching for Singles: Archival Approaches for Singleness Studies and Black Women’s Collections by AndreÁ N. WilliamsChapter 2: Reclaiming Single Women’s Work: Gender, Melodrama, and the Processes of Adaptation in The Best of Everything by Jennifer S. Clark  Chapter 3: Recovering Single Biography: Jane Armstrong Tucker, Illness, and the Single Life by Elizabeth DeWolfePart II: Familiar Figures: Representing and Reforming the Single WomanChapter 4: Becoming Single: Gidget “Betwixt and Between” by Pamela Robertson WojcikChapter 5: F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Sinking Ship of Future Matrimony:” The Unmarried Flapper in Literature and on Screen by Martina MastandreaChapter 6: Neither Betwixt nor Between: Divorced Mothers in the United States, 1920-1965 by Kristin CelelloChapter 7: Serves One: Exploring Representations of Female Singleness in American Cookbooks by Ursula KaniaPart III: Singles at Home: Domestic LaborsChapter 8: Feeling “Like a Queen:” Later-Life Single Women at Home in Modern American Short Fiction by Katherine FamaChapter 9: “Spinsters’ Rest?”: The Discomforts of Home in British Women’s Short Stories of the 1920s to the 1940s by Emma LigginsChapter 10: All the Single Nannies: Reforming Elite Domesticity and the Cultural Imaginary by Ann MattisAfterword by Benjamin KahanAcknowledgementsNotes on ContributorsBibliographyIndex

"Single Lives, focusing on a wide range of British and American texts from the nineteenth to the present century, makes a timely feminist intervention into ongoing critical conversations about the representation of women’s singleness. This engaging interdisciplinary collection, which foregrounds diverse embodiments of singleness, revisits familiar figures, and promotes expanded methods and sources to better understand single women’s lived experiences, promises to greatly enrich the field of singleness studies." - Anthea Taylor (author of Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster) "Drawing from wide-ranging disciplines and spanning a century of British and American history, Single Lives offers an original and engrossing analysis of how the figure of the single woman stands as an implicit challenge to the norm of the patriarchal nuclear family."- Kathleen Rowe Karlyn (author of The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter) "Single Lives, focusing on a wide range of British and American texts from the nineteenth to the present century, makes a timely feminist intervention into ongoing critical conversations about the representation of women’s singleness. This engaging interdisciplinary collection, which foregrounds diverse embodiments of singleness, revisits familiar figures, and promotes expanded methods and sources to better understand single women’s lived experiences, promises to greatly enrich the field of singleness studies." - Anthea Taylor (author of Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster) "Drawing from wide-ranging disciplines and spanning a century of British and American history, Single Lives offers an original and engrossing analysis of how the figure of the single woman stands as an implicit challenge to the norm of the patriarchal nuclear family."- Kathleen Rowe Karlyn (author of The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter)